A new study suggests that perhaps this network-your-way-to-the-top advice is, for women, a tad overblown. A working paper by Lily Fang, an associate professor of finance at INSEAD, and Sterling Huang, a Ph.D. candidate at the school, focuses on 1,815 Wall Street analysts, their school ties, and their forecasts and recommendations between 1993 and 2009. Fang and Huang found that male and female analysts have an equal number of school-based connections — and in fact, in some cases the women were even slightly more connected to the firms they were covering – but that the men seem to get a lot more help from their contacts. When it came to projecting the performance of the firms they were connected to, the male analysts’ forecasts were slightly more accurate, and their buy/sell recommendations were more likely to be followed.

As Fang wrote for INSEAD Knowledge:

We find that while connections improve forecast accuracy for analysts across the board, the effect among men is significantly higher. For example, while connections lead to a 2 percent improvement in accuracy rankings in general, among men, there is a further improvement of about 1.8 percent. The effect of connections is even greater in… how the market reacts to their buy and sell calls. Connections improve male analysts’ recommendation impact by about 1.2 percent, but not at all for female analysts.

The mens’ connections also made them more likely to be recognized by Institutional Investor, a major coup — analysts listed by the magazine tend to earn three times more than other analysts. The women’s connections had no such impact.

These discrepancies began as soon as the analysts were hired, suggesting that men and women are set on different trajectories at the very outset of their careers, by factors outside of their control. And Fang and Huang also found that, because of the greater impact of the men’s connections, male analysts were about 1% more accurate in their forecasts overall. (I’m drawing a causal inference here because the difference between connected and unconnected analysts was bigger than the difference between men and women generally. Previous studies have shown that once you factor in transaction costs — men trade more frequently — male and female investors have about equal returns.)

Fang and Huang found one set of connections that did prove helpful to female analysts: connections with executive women. A female analyst with a tie to a female executive at a firm she was covering saw her accuracy rise by 2.5%, as opposed to the 2% improvement they found for any and all connections. But this turns out to be a double-edged sword as well. Male analysts with a tie to a male executive saw their own accuracy rise by 4.7%, suggesting that men are much more willing to help other men. “The value of the ‘old boys club’ is hard to refute in our data,” Fang writes.

She and her co-author also found that 35% of the women in their sample had attended an Ivy League school as opposed to only 25% of the men. This could suggest that women need to have more advantages to even get into finance in the first place. (Even in 1993, at the very beginning of their sample, women were more likely to have an Ivy League degree. In 1993, 42% of female analysts had gone to an Ivy, compared with 32% of the men.)

While Fang and Huang’s study is limited to the investment industry, other researchers have found similar effects elsewhere. INSEAD professor Herminia Ibarra found similar effects in the advertising industry 23 years ago in a study conducted while she was at Harvard.

This is also not the first study to show that there are aspects of the standard (eg, male) playbook that don’t seem to work for women. As Sarah Dillard and Vanessa Lipschitz noted in their HBR article, “Research: How Female CEOs Actually Get to the Top” there’s a now-familiar pattern taught to ambitious young people:

Ambitious young women hoping to run a major business someday are often advised to take a particular career path: get an undergraduate degree from the most prestigious college you can, an MBA from a selective business school, then land a job at a top consulting firm or investment bank. From there, move between companies as you hopscotch your way into bigger roles and more responsibility.

However, their research found this story is basically a fiction. It did not apply to the 24 women who became Fortune 500 CEOs. Rather, those women were more likely to have spent long periods of time at a single company.

The median long stint for these women CEOs is 23 years spent at a single company in one stretch before becoming the CEO. To understand whether this was the norm, we pulled a random sample of their male Fortune 500 CEO counterparts. For the men in the sample, the median long stint is 15 years. This means that for women, the long climb is over 50% longer than for their male peers. Moreover, 71% of the female CEOs were promoted as long-term insiders versus only 48% of the male CEOs. This doesn’t leave a lot of time for hopscotch early in women’s careers.

And while having an MBA was hardly a prerequisite for either the men or the women, women were more likely than men to have one: 25% of the women and 16% of the men held an MBA from a top-ten business school. Just as in the Fang-Huang study, the women who got ahead were more credentialed than their male counterparts. This is consistent with other research that in order to succeed, women have to work harder to prove themselves.

Perhaps most famously, the body of research around gender and negotiation also suggests that what works for men does not work for women — and in fact may even backfire. Most people are by now familiar with the research that showed women are much less likely to ask for raises than are men. But many are still unfamiliar with the subsequent research that shows why: when women do ask for more, they’re penalized for it. Simply asking for more, like a man would, is simply not a good strategy for a woman seeking to increase her earning power.

Even women’s relative lack of confidence has been lambasted. Fake it ’til you make it, ladies! is the rallying cry. But again, an oft-overlooked body of research suggests that women have, in fact, a more accurate view of our abilities than men do, and that overconfidence is much more of a problem for men than underconfidence is for women.

To me, the upshot of all of this research is increasingly clear: we need to stop telling women to follow a male playbook. It doesn’t work for women. And I would argue that it doesn’t work that well for companies, either. Raises should go to the people who bring their firms the most value — not those who are simply better at, and less penalized for, asking for them. Promotions ought to be handed out according to who is the smartest and most capable, not according to who appears the most confident. And although there are benefits to social capital, as Fang and Huang’s study makes clear, rewarding the people with the chummiest network simply creates a self-fulfilling cycle.

Consider that in Fang and Huang’s study, they did not find that the men were more likely to be promoted than the women. No — only that men were more likely to be promoted on the basis of social capital, while women were more likely to be recognized for “documentable and measurable competence.” Promoting someone based on measurable competence! What a wild idea. We should try it sometime.